OK, Timothy Ferriss: You win. You are the greatest self-promoter in the world.
When Wired.com asked our readers to help pick champion self-promoters, we were completely unprepared for the onslaught of your fans. They not only voted for you, again and again, they also nominated you (along with Tim Farriss, Timothy Ferris, and other variations on your name) literally scores of separate times.
Perhaps that reflects the enthusiasm of people won over by your promise of a four-hour work week. Maybe that reflects the huge quantities of energy that people who have adopted your four-week exercise plan can muster. Or perhaps it's just a sad testament to the poor interface of Wired.com's polling tool, which made it easy for newcomers to the contest to overlook the fact that someone else had already nominated you, many times.
Regardless, it's clear that you've done your self-promotion work so well that you no longer have to do it yourself. You've got legions of fans tooting your horn for you, and that -- more than recognition on the pages of Wired.com -- is the most valuable prize a self-promoter could hope to win.
In the end, we spent a couple hours consolidating the separate nominations and adding up all the votes. Yes, we know this isn't fair, because it allows people to vote multiple times. Suck it up, people, this isn't a presidential election. The results? Timothy Ferriss by a landslide, with 3,583 votes for you and 2,126 votes against you. (Vote tallies are as of Monday afternoon, March 31, 2008, when we did the counting.)
The runners-up didn't even come close: The next most popular pick, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, only got 1,138 votes for him and 426 votes against him. Rounding out the top five are Stephen Colbert, Richard Branson, and Jesus -- despite the fact, as one commenter pointed out, that Jesus never did anything even remotely self-promotional, and left this earth without even having designated an authorized biographer. I mean, that's just elementary P.R., people. But that's the vox populi for you.
So congratulations, Timothy Ferriss. You are Wired.com's pick for the greatest self-promoter of all time.
Photo courtesy Timothy Ferriss
